A framework for business rule driven web service composition

Abstract

With web services emerging as a promising technology for supporting open and dynamic business processes, it is witnessed that standards for business process specification in the context of web services composition have been fast developed in recent years, e.g. WSFL, XLang, BPEL. However, none of the proposing specifications really address the issues of dynamic business process creation, e.g. a vast service space to search, a variety of services to compare and match, and different ways to construct business processes. One of the assumptions these standards make is that the business process is pre-defined. Obviously this assumption does not hold if the business needs to accommodate changes in applications, technology, and organizational policies. We believe business processes can be dynamically built by composing web services if they are constructed based on and governed by business rules. In this paper we analyze the basic elements in business modelling and how they relate to the web service composition process. As a result a rule driven mechanism is developed to govern and guide the process of service composition in terms of five broad composition phases spanning abstract definition, scheduling, construction, execution, and evolution to support on demand and on the fly business process building. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.